Ethics: Not Just a New Way to Throw Up Wirelessly and with a Lisp

by Simon Smith 

Well, it's not easy thinking up silly titles for these things, you know; but I've committed myself now, so we're all going to have to put up with it. 

This really going on a lot longer than I had anticipated. I’ve been banging on for ages. Well, let’s see if we can’t make this the last stop on this long and rambling trail.

Last time I ended by suggesting that, while they may supply some interesting and often useful context to our moral thinking, the various subdivisions of ethics don’t really add anything to the formulation of moral principles or to the determination of criteria for applying them. This is because the kind of activity we’re engaged in doesn’t alter the basic moral requirements; neither does it present us with any new moral problems. Advances in technology, to take one example, have not created moral problems; they’ve just re-worked the old ones.

Except that may not be entirely true. A new moral quandary appears to have raised its frankly disturbing head. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, it is now possible to make a sex doll in the form of a child. No, you didn’t misread that. Child sex dolls are now a thing. Several months ago (July 2017) a British man was sentenced to prison for importing and possessing a child sex doll. There was, perhaps inevitably, more to the case than that: images of sexual abuse, I think; but it’s the conviction for possessing the doll that caught my attention. Though I may be wrong, this doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that could be morally problematic without the technology to produce the doll. The technology probably doesn’t have to be modern; I doubt whether the precise manufacturing process and the materials involved are very important. The issue is whether the technology and the process have produced something that invokes moral judgement in a new way.

Let’s have some caveats before we go any further. We are not here concerned with the legality of the situation. The UK’s judicial processes have done what they needed to do in that respect. We do not here presume to judge their conclusions. No more are we concerned with the wider context of this judgement. That this individual was very likely a significant danger to children and had, given the possession of images, apparently exercised this capacity is, to some degree, beside the present point. This is because moral judgement has already been passed here: by and large, I think we might all agree that this aspect of the situation is morally repugnant.

But let’s leave all that aside for the moment and consider on the doll and its possession. Intuitively, one suspects that there is something deeply disturbing going on. The question is, what? What new kind of immorality has technology introduced into the portfolio of human corruption and viciousness? Another, worrying question: if this is a genuinely new moral phenomenon, is our ethical philosophy capable of accommodating it? Will our, more or less traditional, principles of judgement be up to the job?

For a start, I think we can be sure that both Kantian and utilitarian philosophies are going to struggle. On the one hand, and sticking to the issue of possession, the categorical imperative hasn’t obviously been breached, either in terms of universalizability of a maxim or simply by treating anyone as a means rather than an end. It’s not even all that obvious that this individual is behaving irrationally, assuming we regard that as relevant to moral judgement. On the other hand, neither is it clear that possession of child sex doll, in and of itself, causes harm to others; in principle, it might have no effect at all on anyone else. In fact, no form of libertarianism which asserts the individual’s freedom to do as they please in the absence of harm to others is unlikely to be of use.

There is, of course, a social dimension to all this, as Dr. Beauregard reminded me a few weeks ago. The doll had to be manufactured, marketed, sold, delivered, etc., hardly what Mill would think of as an utterly self-regarding action. Accepting this, however, just how it helps us clarify exactly what is morally wrong with all this remains unclear. Knowing that other people might be affected doesn’t really add anything to the attempt to understand how and why the effect is morally problematic.

It seems unlikely that any kind of consequentialist ethics is going to be much good until we have some consequences to judge. Unfortunately, it’s not at all clear that intentionalist theories will be much better. We can’t, after all, say for sure – purely given the possession of the doll – that this appalling douchebag (if you’ll forgive the slip of supposed impartiality) had the intention of harming any actual child. Even if he did – and it does seem quite likely that, somewhere along the line he may well have – we can’t be sure that the intention was connected to the doll, or if it was, what sort of connection it may have been.

Given that likelihood and high risks involved, we may be perfectly happy to accept the judgement of the law, which we can only hope has prevented something terrible happening. Philosophical speaking, however, this does raise questions about how we calculate risk and likelihood in situations like this. I’m not aware of any similar events – which doesn’t mean there aren’t any, of course – but it does make me wonder how we come to a judgement of risk and likelihood.

That aside, it’s still not clear how we ground ethical judgements in intentions when no intentions have manifest themselves; or rather, the intentions which have been enacted don’t obviously point to the harm of another person as such.

One suggestion, again from Dr. B, is that there might be an issue of self-harm here, though I’m not entirely convinced by that. It isn’t clear that someone who harms him or herself really is behaving in a morally problematic way. We may not like it; we may wish to prevent it; but can we really judge it as immoral? It seems more likely that self-harm, however it manifests itself, would be judged to be a symptom of something else, a matter of emotional or psychological health rather than of moral rectitude. To make a moral case might require further theological justification; I’m not convinced that philosophical justification will do the job.

Besides which, I do not take the view that self-harm is always and inevitably wrong. Just recently, while listening to back-issues of The Bugle podcast, I was reminded of Abdullah al-Asiri, a would-be terrorist who, in an effort to blow up a member of the Saudi royal family, packed his bowels with high explosive and a detonator. At least, somebody did. That’s right, he shoved a bomb up his bumhole and tried to blow someone up. As it happens, the attempt failed; Mr. al-Asiri succeeded only in blowing his own arse off. He did not, I believe, long survive the attempt. In this case, not only do I not consider what Mr. al-Asiri did to be morally wrong; I would, most assuredly concur with Messrs. Zaltzman and Oliver in suggesting that this individual be held up as a shining example to all terrorists. Indeed, anyone who thinks that killing other people has either been decreed by their faith or is just a good idea should seek to model themselves on this brave and bizarre fellow. His is the path to follow: those bent on causing murder and mayhem must first bend over and brace themselves for impact, as it were.

Our problem – as opposed to Mr. al-Asiri’s many, many problems – may be that we appear to have adopted, perhaps unwarrantably, certainly without explanation, Mill’s basic moral criterion: viz. harm. But are we sure that harm to someone is the only point at which moral judgement comes into play? Of course, the difficulty there, as everyone knows, comes in trying to determine what constitutes ‘harm’. For example, the destruction of ancient sites of great historical importance in the Middle East by those – let’s be honest – tremendous arseholes in ISIS was a tragedy. Was anyone actually harmed by the destruction – beyond those people actually murdered in the process, I mean – did the act of destroying these markers of human history, in and of itself, did it actually harm anyone? We might say it harmed our civilisation or our humanity; it certainly made the world a worse place. But that doesn’t seem to quite capture what we ordinarily mean by ‘harm’. The very concept of ‘harm’ is being stretched and not obviously in a useful way. Surely we would want to say that something very wrong, morally wrong, was done, irrespective of whether or not anyone was actually harmed.

It seems clear from this that neither traditional Kantian nor any kind of Utilitarian ethics are going to be of use here. Focusing our moral thinking on how we treat people, what we intend, and what the consequences are or may be just leads us away from the point at issue. The question is, was there something morally wrong with the possession of a child sex doll. Those other moral theories have to look beyond this for harm or potential harm. It seems as though their proponents might actually have to say, ‘no, there is nothing actually wrong with owning a child sex doll.’ In that, I think they are mistaken. There is something very morally wrong with possessing a child sex doll.

The question is, what?